The “Japanese New Left” and their philosophical-political “lives”: Redemocratization, Violence, and “Geoideology”

Abstract

This article proposes a study on the “Japanese new left” as a philosophical-political category used to identify, and subsume, the various Japanese student movements of the period 1955-1972 –known as the “long Japanese ‘68”. For this purpose, I will explore two questions. With the first, it will be defended that it is necessary to integrate the “new Japanese left” and, in particular, the student movements that made it up, in the broader process of transition towards the “democratization” of the country, since only in this way can we comprehend, in turn, the violent escalation of some factions and the weight that the authoritarian past of their nation had on them. With the second, it will be questioned in what sense the label “new Japanese left” can be thought as nothing more than one more form of what is known as “libertarian-liberalism” (Clouscard) or, as a ramification of the so-called “geo-ideology” of the United States (Ponce Urquiza).